EFFECT OF EMOTION NAMING ON EMOTION REGULATION IN YOUNGER AND OLDER ADULTS

Abstract Prior research has shown that naming one’s emotions before regulation has a detrimental effect on regulation success (Nook et al., 2020). These researchers argued this effect was due to the affect crystallization that occurs after naming an emotion, which in turn makes it harder to modify or regulate that emotion. The aim of the current replication-extension study was to evaluate whether this effect would replicate in an older adult sample. Due to age-related changes in emotion regulation knowledge and behaviors, we hypothesized that age would moderate this effect, such that older adults would not be detrimentally impacted by naming their emotions, but younger adults would. Younger (18-25 years, N=50) and older adults (60+ years, N=50) viewed 80 IAPS images while being told to first ‘look’ or ‘name’ their experienced emotion and second to ‘look’ or ‘regulate’ their emotions (creating four within-subjects conditions). Unpleasant affect was measured on each trial, analyzed via a 2(age group) X 2(naming: yes/no) X 2(regulating: yes/no) mixed ANOVA. Results suggest a significant three-way interaction; within both age groups, the name-regulate trials were associated with significantly greater unpleasant affect compared to the look-regulate trials, suggesting that naming emotions was detrimental for both age groups. However, contrary to our hypothesis, this effect was larger in older adults (d=.82) than younger adults (d=.41). These findings suggest that affect crystallization may be stronger or faster in older adulthood.

emotion, and behaviorally-coded expression of the target emotion.Overall, there were no group differences in experience or expression, but older adults with MCI perceived that they regulated with less success compared with younger adults and cognitively normal older adults.Younger adults reported experiencing less of the target negative emotion on instructed versus self-selected strategy trials, whereas older adults with MCI expressed less of the target negative emotion on instructed versus self-selected strategy trials.Findings suggest that younger adults and older adults with MCI might benefit more from support with regulating emotions compared with cognitively normal adults, who are theorized to have expertise in this domain.

HOW OFTEN AND WHY DO PEOPLE MANAGE THEIR EMOTIONS?: EMOTION REGULATION IN HEALTHY AGING AND MILD COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT
Tabea Springstein, and Tammy English, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, United States Prominent theories of adult development suggest that individuals increasingly prioritize emotional goals and social relationships as they grow older.Accordingly, older adults are expected to invest more in maintaining their emotional well-being compared to younger adults.Prior work suggests that older adults may accomplish this goal by structuring their lives in ways that reduce the need to manage unwanted emotion.We tested the hypotheses that (1) older adults regulate their emotions less often in daily life compared to younger adults, and (2) when emotion regulation occurs, older adults are relatively more motivated by pro-hedonic and social concerns.Using experience sampling (7x/day for 9 days), we assessed whether emotion regulation frequency and motives differ between younger adults (N = 70), cognitively normal older adults (N = 88), and older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI; N = 60).We found that older adults with and without MCI regulated their emotions less frequently than younger adults, even when controlling for mean levels of positive and negative emotional experience.However, there were largely no group differences in emotion regulation motives (i.e., why people wanted to manage their emotions).Future work is needed to explore how age-related differences in life contexts might contribute to less need for emotion regulation in relatively older adults.Less frequent regulation could be beneficial in terms of helping older adults preserve their more limited cognitive resources.The findings regarding motives add to growing research on aging which suggest maintenance or similarity in many emotion regulation processes across adulthood.

EFFECT OF EMOTION NAMING ON EMOTION REGULATION IN YOUNGER AND OLDER ADULTS Hannah Wolfe, and Derek Isaacowitz, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Prior research has shown that naming one's emotions before regulation has a detrimental effect on regulation success (Nook et al., 2020).These researchers argued this effect was due to the affect crystallization that occurs after naming an emotion, which in turn makes it harder to modify or regulate that emotion.The aim of the current replication-extension study was to evaluate whether this effect would replicate in an older adult sample.Due to age-related changes in emotion regulation knowledge and behaviors, we hypothesized that age would moderate this effect, such that older adults would not be detrimentally impacted by naming their emotions, but younger adults would.Younger (18-25 years, N=50) and older adults (60+ years, N=50) viewed 80 IAPS images while being told to first 'look' or 'name' their experienced emotion and second to 'look' or 'regulate' their emotions (creating four within-subjects conditions).Unpleasant affect was measured on each trial, analyzed via a 2(age group) X 2(naming: yes/no) X 2(regulating: yes/no) mixed ANOVA.Results suggest a significant three-way interaction; within both age groups, the name-regulate trials were associated with significantly greater unpleasant affect compared to the look-regulate trials, suggesting that naming emotions was detrimental for both age groups.However, contrary to our hypothesis, this effect was larger in older adults (d=.82) than younger adults (d=.41).These findings suggest that affect crystallization may be stronger or faster in older adulthood.Strength and vulnerability integration theory (SAVI; Charles, 2010) posits that age differences in emotional experiences vary based on the distance from an emotionally eliciting event.Before and after a stressor, SAVI predicts that older age is related to motivational strivings that often result in higher levels of well-being.During stressor exposure, however, age effects are predicted to be attenuated or disappear completely.The present study examined how younger (n = 85; M age = 22.56 years) and older (n = 85; M age = 71.05years) adults reacted to and recovered from a cognitive stressor using repeated positive and negative emotion probes.Results showed that both age groups were negatively impacted by the stressor, and both reported an initial boost in recovery afterward.However, older adults continued to recover across the recovery period compared to younger adults.This work elucidates that older adults are significantly impacted by stress but exhibit a resounding recovery.

INTRINSIC HEALTH: TOWARD A FRAMEWORK FOR THE OBJECTIVE STUDY OF THE BIOLOGY OF HEALTH
Chair: Alan Cohen Co-Chair: Martin Picard Discussant: Karen Bandeen-Roche Many definitions of health have been proposed over the years, but all share the characteristic of being subjective and therefore hard to tie to objective measures of biology.While there are undoubtedly subjective aspects of health, here we propose the notion of "intrinsic health" as the capacity of an organism to maintain its internal, biological dynamic equilibrium.Building on first principles, Cohen and Picard show how intrinsic health emerges from the dynamic interplay of energy, communication, and structure at multiple levels of biological organization.The following three talks then propose novel ways to measure intrinsic health.Khan and Wei show how quantile aberrance -modeling when biomarker values are extreme based on the joint distributions of many biomarkers -can be used to quantify intrinsic health.Liu, Xu, Honfo, and Cohen show how metrics of proteome dynamics reflect communication within the organism and can be extracted to quantify health.Finally, Wang and Pei show how transfer entropy -the synchronization between multiple time series -can be extracted to measure health.While these three metrics are still in preliminary stages of development, they show the potential to measure health based on the multivariate dynamics of our internal systems.Going forward, these and other approaches may be integrated to derive robust, objective metrics of intrinsic health, and could serve as the basis for a novel understanding of how aging emerges from declines in intrinsic health over time.

A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK TO UNDERSTAND INTRINSIC HEALTH
Alan Cohen 1 , Martin Picard 2 , John Beard 1 , Daniel Belsky 1 , Linda Fried 1 , Kelli Hall 1 , Julie Herbstman 1 , and Nour Makarem 1 , 1. Columbia University,New York City,New York,United States,2. Columbia University Irving Medical Center,New York City,New York,United States Traditional approaches to measuring health have relied largely on measures of function and capacity, or on subjective assessments.These approaches are important, but they result in a large gap between the biology underlying health and our ability to measure it.Here, we propose a novel concept -intrinsic health -defined as a field-like state emerging from the dynamic interplay of energy, communication, and structure within the organism, which enables robustness, resilience, adaptability, and performance.It reflects the capacity of an organism to maintain its internal dynamic equilibrium.These three pillars -energy, communication, and structure -are derived from first principles, and are the basic ingredients of life.Disruption or optimization in the organized flow of energy and information through biological structures provide a foundation to understand the causes of disease, and the foundation for health, respectively.For each pillar, we discuss available measurements that cover multiple levels of biological organization, empirical evidence linking them to traditional health outcomes, and also the limitations of isolated measurements.This motivates the use of more integrative, time-series data reflecting the dynamic psychobiological interplay among organ systems.We then situate intrinsic health in the context of environmental, behavioral, and cultural factors that affect how it is transformed into "realized health," the health we experience as individuals and populations.The intrinsic health framework can be extended to understand how intrinsic health intersects with aging, disease, and wounds.Finally, we propose a measurement framework to quantify intrinsic health at the individual level.